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A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

blog.golivecosmos.com

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Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#21

Post by mdekkers »

roca wrote: post #6

Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc. Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and mak…

All of these “cloud is better” reasons have all proven to be no better than some kind of local nas + backup, but a lot more expensive.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#22

Post by koito17 »

withinboredom wrote: post #20
buro9 wrote: post #17

Syncthing is a dream. Photos sync'd from phone to laptop making pics taken instantly available to share via desktop apps. Also add in the NAS and you have three copies before you consider RAID or BTRFS or anything. Replace Dropbox with syncthing and you have multiple folders and can choose which folders go to which devices. Put a NAS at a second location and you have the ability to power up and power down the remote…

Garage ( https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ ) gets pretty close for object storage. It’s built with mixing high/low latency links and replication between multiple hosts. Unfortunately it’s not really built for end-users, but devs, so there’s no ui or anything like that.

Yup. Garage is painless to set up and, unlike Minio, is designed for "small scale", self-hosted use cases where your nodes may not have identical storage and compute. One current caveat of Garage, compared to Minio, is that anonymous access is not supported. (Patches welcome!) This means you can't easily generate or share links to files in a bucket.

I personally use Garage for locally testing things that run against the S3 API. It's very easy to run the single binary directly. No need for containers, but of course that is also an option, and it's very easy to containerize since you realistically only need to run a statically linked binary and mount a TOML file somewhere.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#23

Post by arghwhat »

ThaRedah wrote: post #3

What this article fails to justify is there isn't a simple solution for users to have a "Local Cloud". A NAS or Hard Drive on a computer will be beat by the ability to have all of your photos/software on you wherever you go. There needs to be a better way for Personal devices to access personal or home networks for personal cloud solutions to become more accessible to the average person.

Most popular NAS have built-in services for remote access that regular users can use.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#24

Post by Helmut10001 »

I run a 48 TB ZFS pool (Z2; 24TB usable), and an offsite, offline 48 TB ZFS pool (mirror).

My primary server is Proxmox, where I have 8 unprivileged VMs with Docker nested inside (since ZFS 2.2.0, Docker on unprivileged ZFS works now without detours).

My backup is ZFS-send plus Borgmatic as a fallback, until I trust the ZFS-send approach that I just added (I usually have "migration phases" for new features that may last 1-2 years).

I run Gitlab, Nextcloud, Funkwhale, InfluxDB, Graphana, Homeassistant, Mailcow-Dockerized (as an email-management and collector solution) and other things. All of this not public, but on local VLAN and VPN. The good thing with Docker + Watchtower is that I only have very little (For connecting households (my brother's family etc.), I use OPNsense and pfSense boxes.

My server is powered by a 90 kWp solar array - I don't have a (house-) battery yet, but that will be added in 1-2 years. Current energy consumption is about 250 Watt - but I also have an old Xeon from 2013.

The main cost (after initial investment) is harddrives and (of course) learning time. It pays off in other areas, too. I just got a job that I think I only got because of my report of self-hosting.

The biggest convenience is that I can sync all devices and all data (e.g. Nextcloud auto-upload from phones, DAVx5 for calendar/contacts) to a single, secure and private place that is then automatically backed up. I don't know the correct word, but maybe "liberating" describes the feeling best.

All of this does not require super-secret knowledge, just some motivation (and you should not be completely broke). I started in 2017 with the plan to learn Linux and get away from FAAN(M)G and I am happy I started this endeavor back then.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#25

Post by JeanMarcS »

Ok. So now your house is on fire. How do you retrieve your datas from the melted local NAS ? Or a buglar come and empties it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm full "move away from the cloud" in the "proprietary cloud" way.

But getting some drive space on a different location is important if you care about your datas.

Could be in a relative's or friend's place (so almost no per month cost) or on a cloud drive (I personnaly use the Hetzner 10€/m 5TB drive), depending on your choice of backup solution.

But it's important.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#26

Post by deepmauka »

RajT88 wrote: post #16

My local setup - please critique as you like. For NAS, I am running Windows Server 2022 (I have a rational reason for this). It hosts many things. * IIS, for my local browser start pages, I configure with "new tab redirect" plugins * JellyFin - Basically a personal Netflix for all my ripped media * DokuWiki, thumbdrive version - for documenting house stuff * Twonky - Because it's the least-bad DLNA solution I've used…

Thanks for sharing your elegant and versatile setup.

A thought for the discs and safety deposit boxes,

I live in a rural area and have an account with a credit union that service several labor unions. They’re rooted in the community, profitable, and I don’t see them changing anytime soon. 3”x10” boxes are $20/yr.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#27

Post by ssss11 »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #24

I run a 48 TB ZFS pool (Z2; 24TB usable), and an offsite, offline 48 TB ZFS pool (mirror). My primary server is Proxmox, where I have 8 unprivileged VMs with Docker nested inside (since ZFS 2.2.0, Docker on unprivileged ZFS works now without detours). My backup is ZFS-send plus Borgmatic as a fallback, until I trust the ZFS-send approach that I just added (I usually have "migration phases" for new features that may l…

That all sounds great but what we desperately need is instructions on how to do things like this for the less technical, and easy maintenance… I think those are the limiting factors for wide spread adoption

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#28

Post by dun44 »

roca wrote: post #6

Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc. Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and mak…

Security: with cloud nobody cares, things leak all the time w/o much consequences

Reliability: unless you’re multi-bilion customer nobody cares, Google can simply ban your account and they won’t assign a human intern to perhaps reconsider dropping all your data because the effort would never pay

With local storage there is at least one person who cares about those problems. With cloud there is none.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#29

Post by politelemon »

Sorry to be disparaging, was this generated content? The points made are so hand wavy, and address barely any of the topics they're headlining, and pretending there are no similar issues with local storage.

This is very questionable quality, relying on just one piece of reasoning repeatedly.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#30

Post by Helmut10001 »

ssss11 wrote: post #27
Helmut10001 wrote: post #24

I run a 48 TB ZFS pool (Z2; 24TB usable), and an offsite, offline 48 TB ZFS pool (mirror). My primary server is Proxmox, where I have 8 unprivileged VMs with Docker nested inside (since ZFS 2.2.0, Docker on unprivileged ZFS works now without detours). My backup is ZFS-send plus Borgmatic as a fallback, until I trust the ZFS-send approach that I just added (I usually have "migration phases" for new features that may l…

That all sounds great but what we desperately need is instructions on how to do things like this for the less technical, and easy maintenance… I think those are the limiting factors for wide spread adoption

I agree. We need more and better instructions and easier-to-setup tools - all of this got a big boost with docker (compose). On the other hand, we need to pair the less-technical with the power-users and help each other. I am responsible for about 8-10 people. This frees them from cloud providers and helps me to built better and more robust solutions.
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